Modelling Sowards Coal Trestle

Working my along Kingston's waterfront on my HO scale Hanley Spur layout, I've reached the Sowards coal trestle near Place d'Armes. How to model something you can't see, and that exists in very few photos I've come across so far?  Well, the natural tendency is to check other such installations. Note: the following pictures are NOT from Kingston....

A chief concern was the length and gradient of the trestle. With two photos in At the Bend in the Road one showing the track-entry end of the coal trestle shed and another showing the inclined track near Fort Frontenac and Ontario Street, it's hard to know if the trestle was level or not.

In February 1945, CP was granted permission to construct a 230-foot unloading trestle. Locomotives were not to be operated over the trestle or beyond the entrance to the coal shed. I wondered if a car's handbrake would be enough to hold the car on an incline, or was some other measure (?chain) used to hold a hopper car in place for unloading. From 1947 fire insurance map:

This inclined trestle on the Tweetsie in North Carolina appears to be similarly inclined:

Gravity was the watchword when unloading coal. Many sites simply employed a one- or two-stage conveyor with no trestle, like this one in Denville, NJ:

I have the trestle from the Walthers O.L. King Coal (creatively-named) yard which is level. I'm using it, with a three-foot piece of Flextrack supported by Tyco trestle bents which I'm planning to model as concrete, not timbers, like the prototype. It's safer for me to spot cars on the level than to try to secure them on an incline. And I'll have to use idler or reacher cars to keep the locomotive safely out of the structure as in the prototype. Watch for model photos as the project moves toward completion. I'm stoked!

In the top photo, I think I can see the Sowards trestle shed (yellow arrows in colour closeup superimposed over black & white view). Though I'm not sure if the track is level or inclined, the roof is flat or peaked, or even how the coal was handled below, I'm going with what I've got until other prototype photos or information are available. One more view, from the Best Map Ever:

For the main shed structure, I'm reusing a structure I've used twice before! On my Winnipeg layout, it was part of a plastics plant; on my Vancouver layout it was part of a terminal grain elevator; and on my Vermont layout, it was the unloading shed for the Ide feed mill:

Though the shed has metal-pattern styrene applied to it, I'm going to transform it into 'wood' and keep the peaked shingled roof. The ends need to have a tad more clearance, and the whole structure will need to be raised several scale feet off the ground for clearance. I've added styrene to cover in the wood of my Tyco trestle bents, painting the whole bent concrete-colour. See this post that shows how I improved on this initial model.

To make the unloading trestle complete, I placed it on a base of cardboard. I bought some dollar-store sofr modelling clay, forming it into sloped piles on the cardboard, molding them around the trestle legs. Painting the piles with water-based craft paint (also dollar store) I dropped black-coloured craft sand (yep, dollar store - another year of revenue-neutral modelling) on the piles and let the sand dry into the paint. Now, to make the accompanying ship-delivered coal piles all around!